— X — wrote:

wv wrote:

Anybody wanna post any articles, thots on the Reps famous “Southern Strategy” ? Was/is it racist? Or just conservative?

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link:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/24/how-racism-explains-republicans-rise-in-the-south/
…Lee Atwater, an adviser to President Reagan, discussed the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy” in an interview in 1981, explaining that some white voters might subconsciously support conservative policies apparently unrelated to race, if those policies had different consequences for different races.

“You say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff and you get so abstract,” Atwater said. “You talk about cutting taxes and these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

More than two decades later, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman criticized that strategy.

“Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” he said in 2004. “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”

Yet research suggests the racial undertones of policy debates continue to affect some Americans’ political affiliations. A study published in 2013 concluded that white respondents to an online survey were more likely to identify with the tea party if they held anti-black sentiments.
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I have no doubt that there was some separation between black voters and the republican party several decades ago, but what’s perpetuating the racial divide now? Why do blacks feel they’re disenfranchised (if they do think that at all)? What is the left doing to assuage their concerns about race relations? If nothing, then they don’t care either. They’re also using them for political gain.

wv wrote:

Yet research suggests the racial undertones of policy debates continue to affect some Americans’ political affiliations. A study published in 2013 concluded that white respondents to an online survey were more likely to identify with the tea party if they held anti-black sentiments.

That’s lazy. Source? Questions they asked and form?

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All good questions. Now over the next few weeks lets all do a search now and then. See whats out there. I got no time the next few days.

wiki:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a national civil rights organization, for exploiting racial polarization to win elections and ignoring the black vote.[13][14]

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• This reply was modified 9 years, 5 months ago by wv.

nittany ram wrote:

Greenwald also notes that Obama leaves office with high approval ratings, suggesting there’s little evidence to show that racism is any more an issue in 2016 than it was in 2008 and 2012:

What a ridiculous supposition. Obama’s approval ratings say nothing about the amount of racism that exists in the country at any given time. They are completely unrelated.

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True. And racism is always part of the republican southern strategy, etc, etc, and so forth — but fwiw, i dont see why racism would be any ‘more‘ of an issue than in 2012 or earlier.

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link:http://johnhilley.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/the-real-cause-of-trump-rampant.html

…Trump appears to have done best among middle-income Americans, and narrowly beat Clinton among the affluent. But the biggest shift to Trump – a 16-point swing– came from those earning less than $30,000 a year, even though he still lags behind Clinton among this group. Last time they voted for the country’s first black president. This time they shifted to a candidate backed by avowed racists, and ensured he won….

….
… As Glenn Greenwald more convincingly argues, liberal denial and deflected blame following both Trump and Brexit have only obscured the real issue:

The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.

Greenwald also notes that Obama leaves office with high approval ratings, suggesting there’s little evidence to show that racism is any more an issue in 2016 than it was in 2008 and 2012:

People often talk about “racism/sexism/xenophobia” vs. “economic suffering” as if they are totally distinct dichotomies. Of course there are substantial elements of both in Trump’s voting base, but the two categories are inextricably linked: The more economic suffering people endure, the angrier and more bitter they get, the easier it is to direct their anger to scapegoats.

Greenwald also relates, at Democracy Now, how the US media first talked-up Trump during the primaries, then turned on him when he became the Republican’s candidate:

And in a big way, that also played a role, unwittingly, I think, in helping Trump, because, of all the institutions in the United States, the institutions of authority that are hated, the American media leads the way.

Unlike liberal denialists and moderated leftists like Jones, Greenwald takes us to the closer heart of why Trump got elected.

It’s here we get to the essential cause, rather than symptoms, of what we’re now witnessing in America, as elsewhere: rampant neoliberalism.

Neoliberal doctrine has been relentlessly imposed by a liberal political class, and propagated at every level of life, notably by a corporate media. In a fine study article on neoliberalism, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Anis Shivani writes:

I would go so far as to say that neoliberalism is the final completion of capitalism’s long-nascent project, in that the desire to transform everything—every object, every living thing, every fact on the planet—in its image had not been realized to the same extent by any preceding ideology.

And, for Shivani, there’s been no more zealous practitioner of unrestrained neoliberalism than Clinton:

When Hillary Clinton frequently retorts—in response to demands for reregulation of finance, for instance—that we have to abide by “the rule of law,” this reflects a particular understanding of the law, the law as embodying the sense of the market, the law after it has undergone a revolution of reinterpretation in purely economic terms. In this revolution of the law persons have no status compared to corporations, nation-states are on their way out, and everything in turn dissolves before the abstraction called the market.

Complementing this view, Nomi Prins provides a detailed assessment of Hillary Clinton’s service to Wall Street. She recalls how Clinton backed her husband in dismantli….see link

— X — wrote:

wv wrote:

I was in an anti-war march once in Wash DC, and it meant something ‘meaningful’ to me. I knew it wouldnt ‘change’ any policies but it still meant something to me. I wanted to be there. Kindof a spiritual/emotional/social thing. But ‘meaningful’ all the same.

You dont like protest now?

I assume you mean the protest against Vietnam? That’s a meaningful protest. What we’re seeing now is meaningless (yes, to me), because it’s a protest about not liking someone. It has no political relevance other than (a) not liking Trump’s rhetoric, (b) irrational fears about concentration camps (yes I heard that a few times) and (b) wanting to lobby for an elimination of the electoral college (none of whom would protest it if their candidate won). Maybe I’m getting old or something, but this whole ‘movement’ just seems like out of control entitlement, and multiple people are joining for no other reason than to be a part of something – and they have no idea what (watch some YT or Vine videos to see proof of this). And the worst part of it is, this is what the left predicted would happen if Trump lost. Never once did they assume that their own would be the ones who wouldn’t accept the peaceful transfer of power. It’s glorious in its irony. Sorry, but despite my desire to be more evolved than this, I can’t help but feel more than a little amused by the ridiculousness of it all.

Protest when something egregious actually happens. Not because you think it will.

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No the protest i was at was during the Bush years.

You are entitled to your view, of course but you just seem really harsh to me, and painting with SUCH a broad brush. You have reduced all those thousands and thousands and thousands of separate, individual reasons for protesting to “they just dont like someone”.

If they were protesting Hillary would you think the same way? If they were protesting “political correctness” would you feel the same way?

This election was a HUGE deal to Americans. One side was going to be ELATED and one side was going to be CRUSHED emotionally. The good folks who feel crushed need to express themselves and regroup and network etc. Protest is something they need to do first, before moving to the next step of organizing and getting back to their normal routine.

Democracy is messy.

Maybe we just think differently about ‘protest’ in general. I think there should be MORE of it. I’d like to see more people get off their butts and turn the TV off and get more involved in protests and politics.

Btw, i remember being at a protest here in Motown (GW came to town) and there were maybe a thousand or so protestors and we were all being respectful and civilized and all that — and the newsmedia ignored all of us, but they swarmed around a handful of nutcases dressed in weird costumes who seemed mentally unstable. Thats who the media wanted to talk to. Sigh.

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— X — wrote:

What’s happening right now with these meaningless protests is part of the reason why Trump took Middle America. And I wonder if that comment about the widening divide over education could also be interpreted as an indictment of higher education.

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Why would you say the protests are ‘meaningless’ ? You mean they are meaningless to ‘you’ right? Because each individual person involved in each separate protest has their own personal reason for being there.

I was in an anti-war march once in Wash DC, and it meant something ‘meaningful’ to me. I knew it wouldnt ‘change’ any policies but it still meant something to me. I wanted to be there. Kindof a spiritual/emotional/social thing. But ‘meaningful’ all the same.

You dont like protest now?

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— X — wrote:

Sensory overload. What I’ve noticed over the past few years, or maybe longer – ever since the proliferation of independent blogs – is that it doesn’t take much for a rumor or false story to get promoted up through the ranks by other, “more legitimate” sites not taking the time to fact-check stuff. MSM is like the Rotoworld of news gathering & reporting now.

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Ok but i heard Goff is the new Secretary of Defense,
and Dick Cheney is getting his first start against Miami.

Seriously, i love love love the internet,
but I’m not sure what the hell its doing to us. So much…information.

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“…But Trump’s victory cannot be explained by racism alone – and the efforts to understand race and class separately result in one misunderstanding them both entirely. Indeed, to get to the bottom of Trump’s appeal we will have to go beyond any monocausal interpretation of these results and adopt a more intersectional approach, one that takes into account the fractious way a constellation of identities collide and align.

People are, of course, many things – male, white, straight, rural, college-educated and so on – and just one thing: themselves. It is that whole person, not a segment of it, that goes to the polls and that we need to understand. Hillary Clinton won women – but Trump won white women and older women…”
…
…..Older people voted for Trump and younger for Clinton, although young white men went to Trump. In another sign of the widening divide over education – also visible in the Brexit vote – college graduates were for Clinton, those who did not attend or finish for Trump. An even starker partisan divide than gender or age was visible in the split between the rural and the urban vote….”

..
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…..You can pin it on the Russians, WikiLeaks, the FBI, the media, third parties, and they all played a role. But sooner or later moderate liberals are going to have to own the consequences of their politics. In this period of despair and volatility, their offer of milquetoast, market-led managerialism is not a winning formula. For a political camp that boasts of its pragmatic electability, it has quite simply failed to adapt.

Carefully scripted but complacently framed, the Clinton campaign emerged from a centrist political tradition at a moment where there is no centre, offering market-based solutions at a time when Clinton’s own base has begun to see the free market as part of the problem….
… In short, economic injustice and class alienation are as much the reason why Clinton lost as why Trump won. He stoked his base’s fears; she failed to give her base hope.
Read this series from the beginning

“People look around Muncie and think, ‘What has capitalism done for the working man?’” says Dave Ring, the Downtown Food Stand owner who voted for Sanders and then Clinton. “Well, it’s taken our jobs and ruined our infrastructure and increased our healthcare prices so they’re unaffordable. If your job is good and you have good healthcare and you have retirement, then you don’t understand. That’s a very small group of people. And it happens to be the group of people who are in power.”
…
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….Trump did not introduce racism to the modern Republican party. He simply refused to observe institutional etiquette.

For half a century, Republicans had relied on Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, which deployed a coded racial message that could bind together a formidable coalition of southern states and suburban white voters. “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Nixon told his chief-of-staff Bob Haldeman. “The key is to devise a system that recognises that while not appearing to.”

Trump had no problem “appearing to”, although he focused his bigotry on Latinos and Muslims more than African-Americans. Some people voted for him because of this rhetoric, while others voted for him because it didn’t put them off. The Republican party establishment was terrified by it. Even with less inflammatory rhetoric, the party had been struggling to win the White House….see link

• This reply was modified 9 years, 5 months ago by wv.
• This reply was modified 9 years, 5 months ago by wv.